Petition to Let the Long Beach City Council Know Raising Your Taxes to Solve the Fiscal Crisis is Not the Answer. [Reader Submitted]

Based on a read of the proposed budget the Long Beach taxpayers are being asked to shoulder a 16% tax increase this year, starting July 1, 2012. Double digit tax increases will not help the value of your home recover from the recent downturn and if you rent, get ready to have that increase passed on to you from your landlord.

The projected “blueprint” budget forecasts expenses and estimates revenues (taxes) that will be available to pay for the expenses. As it stands approximately 83% of our expenses are tied to employee salaries, 12% is debt service (funds to make payments on our loans) and the remaining 5% is spend (money to do anything like repair the streets, boardwalk, patch the roof of the Rec. etc.).

It is no secret that the city has not done a good job of managing these costs in the past. We are in a self declared “fiscal crisis”. What is known now is that we do not have any rabbits left in our magic hat to pay for the mismanagement of the past. Clearly, tough decisions will have to be made and our elected City Council members will need to ensure that the management team they put in place carefully makes these decisions.

The fees generated from the beach do not even cover the cost of the lifeguards and beach maintenance required for upkeep. To keep everything as it is now and provide contracted salary increases to all of our city workers will require that we all pay more in taxes. Without letting the City Council know now that you want more accountability from the management of this city and that taxes simply cannot increase, we will be hit with this 16% tax increase and will be looking at an additional increase again next year.

Sign this Petition to Let the Long Beach (NY) City Council Know Raising Your Taxes to Solve the Fiscal Crisis is not the answer.

16 thoughts on “Petition to Let the Long Beach City Council Know Raising Your Taxes to Solve the Fiscal Crisis is Not the Answer. [Reader Submitted]”

Notfornothin’ go to theCOLB facbook page andsee my openletter to the CC
I printed the letter and mailed a copy to each CC member.A
petition is nice but as I grew up I’ll never forget the image in A Hard Day’sNight of the Beatles receiving all that mail ……Your Influence Counts! Use It!

Rich – I’ve sent letters to the City Council and I spoke at several meetings. The petition is a good idea because it makes it easy for residents to sign and deliver a message in one focused place, whereas getting to a meeting to express their outrage or concern seems difficult for many or most of them. So I’ve signed, passed on to neighbors — and will show up at the meetings.

We voted them out in November (see all the : bond downgrade & fiscal mess Blog posts in November). This is today’s reality. We are left with the following:
1. taxes/services have to be raised to cover everything
2. union/employee renegotiations (see petition that was posted yesterday)
3. NIFA takeover – aka Nassau County-style.
4. Mad Max Apocalypse. I started stocking up on water and canned food.

politicaljunky — i believe (but will stand corrected if someone else has better info) that the allegria is in bankruptcy and what it pays and when will be governed by the US bankruptcy law, not what Long Beach wants. thems the breaks. long beach does have the ability to control its costs, though, and needs to start doing so ASAP. many towns across new york and everywhere else are facing fiscal problems and are trying to deal with them. the NUMBER ONE issue for ALL of them is runaway personnel costs. according to most sources (go ahead, google it yourself) the personnel costs of most towns that are suffering is around 75% of the budget. in LB, its 83%. Ouch.

I signed this and believe that the cost structure in our city needs to be addressed and so far the ideas I am hearing from the city via their proposed budget are not addressing the issues head on or for the long term benefit of the taxpayers of Long Beach.